Everyone remembers the Titanic, but a Cunard liner that sank thirty years later killed even more people and has almost vanished from public memory. This episode is the biography of the RMS Laconia, launched in 1921 as a 600-foot symbol of postwar optimism that carried 347 leisure travelers on the first continuous passenger circumnavigation of the globe in 1922. Two decades later she had been stripped of her luxury fittings, packed with empty oil drums for buoyancy, and converted into an armed merchant cruiser and troop transport.

On September 12, 1942, U-156 torpedoed her in the South Atlantic while she carried British personnel, civilian women and children, Polish guards and roughly 1,800 Italian prisoners of war locked in the holds. We cover the chaos on deck, the decision by U-boat commander Werner Hartenstein to surface and launch a res ...